Question

I am opening up a binary file like so:

file = open("test/test.x", 'rb')

and reading in lines to a list. Each line looks a little like:

'\xbe\x00\xc8d\xf8d\x08\xe4.\x07~\x03\x9e\x07\xbe\x03\xde\x07\xfe\n'

I am having a hard time manipulating this data. If I try and print each line, python freezes, and emits beeping noises (I think there’s a binary beep code in there somewhere). How do I go about using this data safely? How can I convert each hex number to decimal?

Answer 1

To print it, you can do something like this:

print repr(data)

For the whole thing as hex:

print data.encode('hex')

For the decimal value of each byte:

print ' '.join([str(ord(a)) for a in data])

To unpack binary integers, etc. from the data as if they originally came from a C-style struct, look at the struct module.